Liana Mir

The truth is I love the music of language and a prose story ended up as a narrative poem of 124 lines ("Queen of Heaven"), even though I knew perfectly well that I wanted to write out a piece of fiction.

And suddenly, I'm knuckling my way through sheets and sheets of this stuff that's just been rejected so free to post or never got finished or has simply been hiding out on my hard drive while I figured out which of my pen names got to claim it. It seems I always do my poetry in sprees and here I am spreeing away when I've got novelettes to write and finish.

A lot of it is when I need to sketch and have that sketch be a finished piece. Weird, huh? I've written a lot of story sketches. They are patently unsharable. And these poems, some of them I can't even label lyric or narrative 'cause they're telling a story but that story is a whole lot of a bigger picture than what I can cram into those narrow 13, 16, 18 lines or what have you.

And sometimes it makes me wonder how much of these stories that I'm capturing, grappling with are just like all those other poems we read from poets talking about their own lives, their own stories. The poem strips away the standard narrative to that vital part that's part of the poet. It teases the reader with the universal aspects of a tale and hides the detail in its carefully crafted words, revealing and disguising in equal amounts.

I can dig into the worlds this way, and it's surprisingly high level. I can hit the broad points and the infinitely, intimately personal and show in just a line, a half a line how they interrelate. It's freeing and awesome and bewildering at once. But I'm having fun.

Do you write poetry? Have you ever used it to tell a story?

So I was a little surprised to discover... myself in this 365 Challenge. My writing self anyway.

Somewhere back in time, I realized I was a post-fandom writer, that there would always be a fangirl lurking in my heart. I suppose it's because I love words, love literature, love taking it in and absorbing it and resonating with it and letting my response flow back into my own creative expression. I weave favorite poems into my prose. I reference material others have written. I write fanfic from the same impulse.

But I hadn't truly suspected that fandom was key to my writing process. Some writers work in a vacuum, solely to please themselves. I wrote within the community, inhaling feedback and prodding and an outside audience wanting more to motivate myself to produce and answer questions and clarify, and that's why I wrote more than 200,000 words the year I got back into fandom. That didn't happen with original fiction.

I thought it was the structure that I needed to replicate and so I started—and temporarily abandoned—two serial novels. Initially there was enough feedback to keep me pushing, but as it lessened to lurking, so did my motivation. Weird, but true. I finally realized 20 days into the 365 Challenge that it wasn't the structure that drove my writing at all. It was the community.

Knowing someone is waiting on my fiction motivates me to produce it. That's why I can write a story in whatever amount of time required to have it done for the family on Christmas. That's why I'm motivated and inspired and have almost a dozen pieces percolating in my head and item 20 out of 365 posted on my Challenge page. It's why I'm writing every day and disciplining myself and growing and still being creative. I'm not just pushing words through my teeth. They're flowing out of me.

Suddenly, it doesn't matter what I read 'cause there's a story somewhere in the mess that feeds it. Suddenly, comments and prompts anchor my ideas until I have time to scribble them down. Suddenly, I've written more than 14,000 words of fiction and 180 lines of poetry in the last twenty days. That's amazing for me. And the momentum is only building.

The creative life takes me off guard sometimes. I always thought I loved writing simply for the sake of writing, but that's apparently not true. I love stories for their own sake and writing for the sake of sharing them.

Has your writing process surprised you lately? Are you a lone writer or community inspired or both?